Malcolm X: Spike Lee's biopic is still absolutely necessary

The film starring Denzel Washington almost didn’t happen over opposition from the Nation of Islam and a lack of financial backing. It overcame to become the most vital civil rights biopic, argues Ashley Clark

n 1992, 22 years before Ava DuVernay’s Selma – which is, amazingly, the first major cinema release to feature Dr Martin Luther King Jr as a central character – came another Hollywood study of a key 1960s African American political figure. Malcolm X was Spike Lee’s sixth movie. Based on the 1965 autobiography co-written by Malcolm and future Roots creator Alex Haley, it’s a 202-minute, continent-hopping epic boasting a superbly charismatic, Oscar-nominated performance by Denzel Washington as the eponymous activist and orator.

Divided into three parts, it charts the early days of X (then Malcolm Little) as a zoot-suited ne’er-do-well marauding in Boston and Harlem; the transformative jail years when he converted to Islam; and, finally, his development as a public activist, his relationship with Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett) and his controversial split from the Nation of Islam, which culminated with his assassination at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom on 21 February 1965. Malcolm X performed solidly at the box office (taking in $48m against a budget of $33m), and was the first major black-authored studio film to offer a three-dimensional portrait of a black leader whose views and actions clashed vigorously with white America.

Unsurprisingly, the film had a troubled route to the screen, reflecting both the enduring difficulty of telling black stories in Hollywood, and the inherent complexity of dramatising the life of such a divisive figure.

Producer Marvin Worth first acquired the rights to the autobiography in 1967, and the project morphed through a host of unrealised iterations. The first attempt was a script by James Baldwin, who was then drinking heavily, and came under severe pressure from the would-be producer and Malcolm’s former NOI associates, who wanted a say. (Of the experience, Baldwin wrote in 1976: “I think that I would rather be horsewhipped, or incarcerated in the forthright bedlam of Bellevue, than repeat the adventure.”) The script, later edited by once-blacklisted screenwriter Arnold Perl, was for the time being buried, although Perl did direct an Oscar-nominated documentary based on the autobiography in 1972. Efforts by Calder Willingham and David Mamet followed, while a tantalising-sounding version, to be directed by Sidney Lumet with Richard Pryor as Malcolm and Eddie Murphy playing Alex Haley, also failed to launch.

Eventually, Lee signed on to direct in 1990, having fought off competition from the Canadian director Norman Jewison. Lee would work from Baldwin and Perl’s script, and recorded the production process in a bitterly funny book, By Any Means Necessary: the Trials and Tribulations of Making Malcolm X (tellingly subtitled While 10 Million Motherfuckers Are Fucking with You!). Lee revealed how he endured a fraught meeting with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who made specific threats against him; and later clashed with Warner Brothers over budget – in protest he took to calling the studio lot “the plantation”.

The bond company which kept the film afloat in post-production folded, so Lee ploughed $2m of his own $3m fee into the movie. Ultimately, Lee had to call upon a generous, moneyed black talent pool (including Oprah Winfrey, Janet Jackson, Bill Cosby, Tracy Chapman and Prince) for help. Hostility came from other quarters: radical black playwright Amiri Baraka mocked Lee in the media as a middle-class “buppie” and, having obtained a leaked script, appeared with 30 vociferous protestors at a preview screening.

Yet Lee prevailed, and the result combines an epic sweep redolent of Lawrence of Arabia with a pop and experimental energy all the director’s own. Of particular note are the exceptional production values, from Ruth E Carter’s sumptuously detailed period costumes to Ernest Dickerson’s cinematography, which uses starkly different shades and tones to comment on each of the film’s three distinct segments.

Lee takes some artistic licence: Malcolm’s brothers Wilfred, Philbert and Reginald are entirely excised, replaced by the fictional character Baines (Albert Hall), despite Reginald being widely acknowledged as the man who got his sibling involved in the NOI. More problematic is the removal of his half-sister Ella, who funded the pilgrimage to Mecca. Elsewhere, Lee is refreshingly unafraid to depict its subject’s more controversial moments – for example, he includes Malcolm’s comments about JFK’s murder being a case of “chickens coming home to roost”.

Further in keeping with its director’s proclivity for provocation (consider the riot ending of 1989’s Do the Right Thing and the subsequent juxtaposition of quotes comparing Malcolm’s and Martin Luther King’s contrasting views on the use of violence), Malcolm X is notable for the ferocity with which it engages directly with contemporary events. Its opening sequence is an audacious, lapel-grabbing montage comprising grainy, genuine footage of the Rodney King incident, an image of the American flag burning into the shape of an X and a voiceover of Washington-as-Malcolm delivering an incantatory speech directly addressed to American blacks (“I charge the white man with being the greatest murderer on earth. I charge the white man with being the greatest kidnapper on earth ... You are one of 22 million black people who are the victims of America.”)

The film also ends in the present, with an optimistic, pan-African coda featuring Nelson Mandela – only recently released from prison in South Africa – addressing a classroom of black schoolchildren in Malcolm’s own words. By today’s standards, these extra-textual bookends seem astonishingly daring. In contrast, Selma’s explicit dialogue with the present is limited to the Oscar-nominated song Glory, by Common and John Legend, which plays over the end credits and references events in Ferguson. If you leave the cinema too early, you might miss it altogether.

It says plenty about the enduring issues faced by black people in America that these two period pictures, made decades apart, have repeatedly and accurately been described by pundits as “timely”. Selma’s most wrenching scene depicts the police murder of young black protestor Jimmie Lee Jackson, and can’t help but evoke the fates of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, John Crawford, Tamir Rice and Akai Gurley, all of whom were killed by police in 2014. Its thematic accent on the process and psychology of nonviolent protest loudly echoes the Black Lives Matter protests and “I can’t breathe”/“Hands up don’t shoot” chants that have rung around the country since the actions of Daniel Pantaleo in July and Darren Wilson in August.

Malcolm X, meanwhile, was released in the wake of the riots which erupted in LA following the brutal (and ultimately unpunished) police beating of Rodney King. It arrived in a harsh, post-civil rights movement climate of rightwing fundamentalism and the “culture wars” which made demonic scapegoats of black male figures from Willie Horton to the “Central Park Five”, and policies such as “broken windows”.

According to Dr Althea Legal-Miller, teaching fellow at University College London’s Institute of the Americas, “Malcolm X emerged from an extension of conversations in the 80s and early 90s about Afrocentric politics, populist black nationalism and hip-hop dialogues from Boogie Down Productions to Public Enemy, whose Bring the Noise starts with a recorded sample from Malcolm’s influential speech ‘Message to the Grass Roots’.” She suggests that the hip-hop generation adopted Malcolm because “he offered black youth a blueprint for self-invention that could be fashioned out of the lived experiences of the ghetto, rising black male murder rates, urban impoverishment, neoconservative apathy and ongoing racism”.

Lee’s film was also a powerful statement against an entertainment culture which routinely prioritised the experience of white saviours in civil rights narratives (see: Cry Freedom, Mississippi Burning), or sweetened the bitter pill with soothing depictions of interracial friendships (The Long Walk Home). Although pernicious white saviour narratives persist today (The Blind Side, The Help, Django Unchained), Malcolm X’s influence does finally appear to be taking hold.

Lee Daniels’ idiosyncratic The Butler is one example of an epic, black-focused story which doesn’t rely on the crutch of a white interlocutor, even if its oddly triumphal conclusion comes perilously close to suggesting America’s racial problems were solved by the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Selma, meanwhile, steadfastly refuses to overstate the role of President Lyndon Johnson in the struggle for voting rights, preferring instead to focus on the grassroots campaigners who forced the issue. The scolding response of some commentators to DuVernay’s nuanced portrayal of Johnson indicates how uncomfortable many remain at the idea of a Hollywood treatment of race relations which portrays whites as anything other than straightforward heroes.

So, could a Hollywood film as unapologetically supportive of a radical, controversial black figure be made today on such a grand scale? Or is Malcolm X likely to remain a magnificent, monolithic one-off? Terence Nance, the Brooklyn-based director of films including An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, is pessimistic, pointing toward an economic shift within the black artistic community: “Black wealth at this point has all but completely divested from progressive, art-first (as opposed to profit-first, or story-first) black film and black art in general”, he argues.

“At the time there was at least some small social connection between black wealth and black artist, and I find that this connection no longer exists.”

Nance’s observation is reflected in the subsequent career of Lee, who had to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund his latest film. Legal-Miller is equally unconvinced: “Malcolm X, like all icons, functions as a barometer in an ever-shifting political landscape. Malcolm X is a symbol of rebellion, the ‘us’ against ‘them’, but when the establishment is Barack Obama, constructing Malcolm X in opposition to ‘the man’ would unleash a Malcolm few of us are ready for.”